COPYRIGHTS AND WRONGS
After writing my last post I discovered that uploads to
Aussies.space are broken, so these words will hopefully flow down
the Gopher hole sometime in the future.
I've been gradually getting more are more lenient in my abidence by
copyright law. I'm still strict about movies and other items widely
available for sale, but with documentaries I've pretty much reached
the point where I figure anything is fair game. I've also decided
that TV shows that haven't been published on DVD/VHS for a decade
or more are alright to take off a P2P service, or sometimes the
Internet Archive.
There are a few factors towards this. First is being able to
re-encode the videos at lower resolution and bitrate on a VPS so
that I can download them without paying for tons of internet data.
Also the offerings on broadcast TV have got worse and worse, even
though weirdly there are more free-to-air TV channels than ever. I
also only watch the government-funded stations, with rare and soon
regretful exceptions, because the advertising elsewhere is just
unbearable.
The odd thing is that I'm coming round to this at the same time as
other people are apparantly going the opposite way for opposite
reasons. I see references online to more people using streaming
services instead of downloading videos illegally (I don't know
enough real-world people to compare first-hand). That in turn is
what the degeneration of TV content is attributed to, since more
money is going to content for those streaming services. Also people
are apparantly attracted by "high definition" resolutions/bitrates,
compared to me shrinking videos down to what I feel is adequate.
Actually I only recently noticed that I've been keeping stereo
audio in the videos yet my TV only has mono speakers, so I'm
encoding new videos with mono audio now and saving an extra 64k/s.
But aside from those technical aspects, it's really the moral
judgement that dictates the decision. For the sake of greedy
American media companies, the copyright term in Australia (which
doesn't depend on registration or renewal as in the USA) was
extended in 2005 from fifty years to seventy years from the year of
publication (or the death of the author for most
non-photographic/sound-recording works). This change wasn't
retrospective, so generally copyright expiry has simply been
stopped since 2005 and won't resume until the start of 2026.
Therefore films from before 1955 are pretty much fair game,
although since many aren't out of copyright in the USA they might
still be taken down from easily-accessed content hosts like YouTube
and the Internet Archive.
So for some years now I've been hitting up the archives of film
noir movies, albeit often the slightly dodgy ones that nobody
bothered to have taken down from public hosting. There doesn't seem
to be enough interest in 1930/40s/50s cinema to find them reliably
via P2P downloads either, so it can be rather frustrating if I get
set on finding one particular film. Much like with the cheap
second-hand VHS/DVDs I buy (which include a lot of these as well,
originally put out by discount publishers), I end up seeing an odd
mix of all time classics and long forgotten rubbish. Though of
course that's probably a more authentic experience in a way anyway.
When it comes to shows produced by the BBC, and ABC in Australia,
I've long been inclined to make my own exceptions to this copyright
law. Popular shows might be produced with the intention for future
sale on DVD to contribute to their production costs, but often
documentaries are only ever shown on TV in the first place. In my
opinion, having been funded entirely by public money, these shows
_should_ be in the public domain in the first place*. If I had my
way it would be criminal for them to even try to restrict access
like they do!
This attitude of mine slowly grew to commercial documentary
productions from the 1990s or earlier that were clearly never going
to get re-released on DVD. Now I've got so slack that I'm including
entertainment shows that aren't produced anymore, aren't for sale
on DVD from any distributors anymore, and haven't been released on
DVD in a decade or longer.
My justification is that in the unlikely circumstance that Channel
4 in the UK did sue me for downloading the complete archive of
Scrapheap Challenge episodes that's at the Internet Archive (where
you'd expect their complaints to be addressed first anyway), they
wouldn't actually be able to claim any loss.
Mind you, this conveniently ignores what may be offered on
streaming services, since I don't use any of them in the first
place (it would cost me way too much in greater internet
data/speed, before even getting to subscription costs). I've really
gone from judging what's fair to the publisher, onto whether the
publisher is fair to me. Requiring a satellite internet
subscription (the only wired internet I can get here is dial-up
(possibly), and my mobile broadband connection is clearly too
unreliable) and $1000 smart TV, to watch a TV show from the mid
2000s, really isn't fair on someone with my income. But then of
course, it's not meant to be.
- The Free Thinker
* I should point out that the Russians have the right idea here.
They've been officially uploading many of their old state-funded
movies at YouTube, surprisingly as well as newer ones from the
post-communist era. Subtitles and all.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm5U4zqpahzyNXBv5ZT51Jw